About

We specialize on the civil engineering for industrial foundations and this is a winning choice because, apparently, in Italy, there aren't so many skilled companies. We learn to communicate successfully with major companies and with high-level constructors. We work regularly on international projects of a certain complexity.

History

The shaft of the arrow: the episodes that gave strength and direction to Cresco growth

18th October 2011. 16:30 p.m. The office is in turmoil, we are preparing for a delivery. It seems clear that everyone knows what to do. The feeling I have is to attend a sporting event and to see a team that repeats with certainty the moves learned in many hours of training. I see Marco beginning to affix the stamps of the approval on the output drawings. The delivery will be on time.

19th October 2011. 8:15 a.m. Fabio approaches me visibly satisfied. I return the same expression and I ask him how many people are working for us at that moment. "About fifty, dad" , his mobile rings, he makes a nod and moves on. Approximately fifty… About 8.000 hours of work in a month, I reflect for a moment on the figure, I conclude that this is something amazing. In just ten years an individual professional studio has turned into this sort of task force which with its responsiveness, flexibility and specialization is able to get results while large engineering companies are often ineffective. I sometimes think about the road we made.

1973. Summer notes of Crocodile Rock pass on the radio, a sheet of immaculate tracing paper is shown on the drawing board that my father gave me. The amaranth nibs in china rotring with a thin red strip and the band that shows with different colors the thicknesses from 0.15 to 0.70 are aligned and ready for use. My work as a professional begins. At that time, a designer just needed a good hand and a good scientific calculator, big companies coordinated and verified the work of the various disciplines by using highly detailed scale models of the plants, in the traditional construction market workers were skilled and the companies were able to obtain profits without being forced to make complaints to their clients. Projects were basic and understandable.

1989. The Berlin Wall falls and I put in my office forever aside all my tools for manual design. My controversial relationship with computers begins: this is my first PC, Intel 80286 or more simply 286, 1 MB of RAM, 5 1/4 floppy disk drive, green screen and a pen plotter. Years later it looks like a small thing, an obvious choice, but it definitely was a brave choice. Many colleagues judged the graphical result obtained with the machine not up to a hand-made one. They had a point, but, I was sure, that would have been the future. Today's people, grown with laser and ink jet, cannot feel the wonder of seeing a plotter pen transferring the design on paper with fast and wonderful movements. It was a real revolution.

1992. In Genoa, in defiance of those who assume the birthplace of Cristopher Columbus elsewhere, there are big celebrations in honor of the 500 years since the discovery of America. Specialized magazines begins to argue that the finite element theories that Boeing had applied in the early ‘50s in aviation will be widely used in civil engineering as well. There's a discussion about a new approach to design, which Graphisoft, throughout ArchiCAD software, has developed in the last few years: the Building Information Modeling. In the regulatory environment, it seems that the allowable-stress method will be substitute by the semi-probabilistic ultimate limit states. They were laying the basis of the civil engineering of today.

2002. Fabio and Marco decide to open their own engineering company, I invite them to join me, I teach them that profit has the expiry date of annual balance, while the credibility will stay with you for your whole career. I find fertile ground, these guys are bright and motivated. We call our professional association ESTprogetti. We specialize on the civil engineering for industrial foundations and this is a winning choice because, apparently, in Italy, there aren't so many skilled companies. We learn to communicate successfully with major companies and with high-level constructors. We work regularly on international projects of a certain complexity.

2008. The financial crisis starts but the workload significantly increases and it requires a change. The idea of a different business model grows, and here, with Ennio's collaboration, Cresco Civil Engineering was born. The name fits because everybody in the office is oriented on a strategy that can ensure a stable growth (in Italian 'Cresco' means 'I grow'). In a few short years, the office is completely reorganized in a more structured model. The quality of our procedures is qualified by ISO 9001 and it becomes a prerogative because we work more in the nuclear field. The aim is the technological innovation: first we study the application of fiber RFX54 Super, replacing rebars in industrial foundations concrete, we develop projects of steel structures and foundations with Tekla Structures, we study and apply using FEM softwares.

19th October 2011, 9:20 a.m. I come back to the present and I give a look to the future. At the moment, these are our main projects: a aluminum rolling mill plant in Oman, a scrap yard material storage in Belgium, a logistic platform in Novara, a picking line in Mexico, another one in France, a hydroelectric plant near Reggio Emilia, a new neighborhood in Genoa, a shopping mall in Paris… I look at the plans of the beautiful offices where we are going to move the next year. Present and future smile. So I do.

This article appeared on the first number of the Cresco Magazine. Since then more happened and new milestones have been achieved.

2012. The aluminium rolling mill plant in Oman has been delivered and new projects have been completed: a scrap yard storage in Belgium, a multimodal logistic centre in Novara, an hydroelectric power plan near Reggio Emilia and a luxurious villa in Georgia.

2013. A new Cresco branch has opened in Christchurch (New Zealand) after the success in an international competition of design for the rebuild of a section of the central city. In October, after two years of hard work, the design for Aeroville has been completed and, with a magnificent ceremony, the shopping mall was opened in Paris.

2014. A new Cresco branch has opened in Milan empowering Cresco network in order to face a global challenge.